Monday, August 27, 2012

We all are painfully aware that the time we have with our greyhounds (and for all pets) is finite. The time comes when our days together are done: those days are all too few.

To lose one is hard enough, but for those who lose two in a short span (days, weeks, months, even a year)...I can't even imagine. But this happened to a greyhound friend of mine.

She named her two greyhounds Atty and Scout after characters in Harper Lee's book To Kill A Mockingbird. I never got the chance to meet Scout but I did meet Atty when my friend picked me up from the Baltimore airport in 2010 for our trip to Dewey Beach. I sat in the back seat with Atty during the two-hour trip.

I took one picture of Atty after we had settled in at our Dewey rental house:

Thursday, August 23, 2012

I love it when Katie head-tilts. I had one of those Audubon talking-bird stuffy in the shape of a loon that, when you squeeze it, turns on a loon recording. The loon was out of her sight behind a comforter that was bunched up in front of her. I closed down my aperture from f/2.8 to f4 for a little more depth of field, and had to press both arms into my sides to try and minimize hand-shake. I focused on her eyes as always.

It came out a little underexposed so I increased it a bit in Lightroom, sharpened around her eyes, added clarity and vibrance, and desaturated the blue pillowcase a little. Her eyes came out too dark, so I dodged both of her eyes.

I wonder what Katie would do if she actually met a real live loon because she whines whenever she hears the call.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 using the 50mm lens; aperture-priority, with aperture set at f/4; camera chose shutter speed of 1/60 second at ISO 800; center-weighted metered; auto white balance; normal JPG.)

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Whenever an upcoming greyhound retirement day is announced I look forward to it. It's always fun to see the new arrivals. And it's interesting to see glimpses of their personalities, even through the stress of leaving the familiar territory of racetrack and kennel.

Since it was around noontime the shadows were strong and deep, so I used my flash to lighten them. Even then I did not set the flash compensation to 0, but instead used my usual -0.7. Turning down the flash's power when standing under the shade of a tree results in the picture being a little dark but the shadows created by the flash are not too obvious:

On the other hand, for this picture I set the flash compensation back to 0 because I was standing in brilliant sunshine:

It's more obvious that I used flash here.

Most of the time I just take head shots of the greyhounds. But I wanted to get both the greyhound and Marissa both in the same shot here:

There was a certain black-and-white female greyhound named "Pookie" that a lot of people noticed and liked immediately. Here are several pictures of her:

She got very excited being talked to in baby-talk -- she has a very happy tail.

Jesse the Chinese Crested did his part in small-dog testing (he played the part of the small dog):

With this group of dogs Jesse pretty much had no problem with any of them.

Kinko again played the part of the cat. Doesn't this need the caption "Draw me like one of your French girls"?:

(Look that up if you don't know what I'm referring to.)

(Shot with the Nikon D300 using the 18-200mm zoom, the 50mm lens, and the SB-800 flash. Normal JPG.)

Saturday, August 4, 2012

I was browsing through a number of posts on Greytalk a few days ago when I saw in the Remembrance forum that Indy the whippet had passed last month. His owner Cindy had asked me to do a session with him (along with greyhounds Dante, Goose, Maverick, and Zoe) in Gettysburg last year. She wanted to get some pictures because he was not well at the time. Indy had lived a rough 11-plus years before he was adopted by Cindy, but she had cared for him for (at the time) three-and-a-half years after that and was truly in his forever home.

We met at the Irish Brigade monument. I told Cindy that we'd walk around the monument and then up the hill above the Loop and to the field above beyond it but only if Indy was up to it. At first I was not sure that Indy go much beyond the monument, but he was game.

He kept up with his greyhound companions.

And then we proceeded to walk up a footpath to the field above the Loop; we took a few more pictures there. I thought that having Cindy walk her pack of hounds might make a nice group picture, so she went up the road with everyone in tow: